NY TIMES: Herman Wallace, Held 41 Years in Solitary, Dies at 71

Published: October 4, 2013

Herman Wallace’s world for much of the last 41 years had been a solitary prison cell, 6 feet by 9 feet, when he left a Louisiana prison on Tuesday, freed by a federal judge who ruled that his original indictment in the killing of a prison guard had been unconstitutional. On Friday morning, Mr. Wallace died of cancer in New Orleans. He was 71.

He had been one of the “Angola 3,” convicts whose solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, an 18,000-acre prison farm on the site of a former plantation, became a rallying point for advocates fighting abusive prison conditions around the world.

Mr. Wallace was serving a prison sentence for armed robbery when the correctional officer, Brent Miller, was stabbed to death in a riot at Angola in April 1972. Mr. Wallace and two other men were indicted in the killing. Two of the three — Albert Woodfox and Mr. Wallace — were convicted in January 1974.

They were placed in solitary confinement, joining another prisoner there, Robert King, who had been convicted of a different crime, and for decades to follow they were locked up for as much as 23 hours a day. Amnesty International published a report on them in 2011, and they were the subject of a documentary film, “In the Land of the Free,” directed by Vadim Jean.

In the film, Teenie Verret, the widow of Brent Miller, said of the killing, “If they did not do this — and I believe that they didn’t — they have been living a nightmare.”

George Kendall, who was a lawyer for Mr. Wallace and who confirmed the death, said in an interview that his client’s original conviction was “a travesty” based on shoddy evidence, and that the men had been kept in solitary confinement because they had been members of the Black Panthers, the black nationalist group. Officials worried “that they would organize the prison,” he said.

Even from solitary, Mr. Wallace worked to improve prison conditions and to press his own appeals, Mr. Kendall said. He answered mail from people who had heard about his case.

“It was a determination he would not be broken by the loneliness of the cell,” Mr. Kendall said.

Mr. Wallace gained further attention for a project that he embarked on with Jackie Sumell, an artist who had struck up a correspondence with him and asked him to describe his “dream house.” She then rendered his imaginings into a scale model of the house, which became an art installation seen in galleries in a dozen countries.

The project, Mr. Wallace had said, “helps me to maintain what little sanity I have left, to maintain my humanity and dignity.” A documentary film about the project, “Herman’s House,” was shown on PBS in July.

Herman Wallace was born on Oct. 13, 1941, in New Orleans, the fourth of eight children. His mother, Edna Clark Williams, worked in the Orleans Parish Prison. She died in 1996. He is survived by his longtime partner, Maria Hinds, and five sisters: Victory Wallace, Lorraine Anderson, Barbara Marshall, Justina Williams and Darlene Williams.

Mr. King was released from prison in 2001; Mr. Woodfox is still in prison in Louisiana.

Mr. Wallace’s cancer was detected in June, his lawyers said. On Tuesday, Chief Judge Brian A. Jackson of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana ordered that Mr. Wallace be released from prison and said he could be retried.

The original indictment, he wrote, was fatally flawed because women had been excluded from the proceedings in which the grand jury was picked. Judge Jackson threatened to hold prison officials in contempt if they failed to release Mr. Wallace immediately.

“He has spent more than 40 years in prison under a conviction and sentence based on an unconstitutional indictment,” the judge wrote. “By any measure, the time remaining on Mr. Wallace’s life sentence is far less than he has already spent in prison.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Wallace was released from the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, La. He was moved by ambulance to the home of a friend and supporter, Ashley Wennerstrom, a program director at the Tulane University School of Medicine.

Though Mr. Wallace was weak, drifting in and out of consciousness, Ms. Sumell said, “He was very well aware of the fact that he was in Ashley’s home, and he was a free man.”

On Thursday, Mr. Wallace was indicted again. Samuel C. D’Aquilla, the district attorney for East and West Feliciana Parish, said in an interview that he believed that the evidence originally used to convict Mr. Wallace remained sufficient to convict him again.

“We just felt that he was a murderer,” Mr. D’Aquilla said, adding, “I know he was old, I know he had medical problems, but when he committed a murder, he didn’t have medical problems.” Brent Miller, the murdered prison guard, he said, “didn’t get another chance.”

As Mr. Wallace lay dying, his friends at the Wennerstrom house did not speak of the indictment as they held a bedside vigil.

“One of the final things that Herman said to us,” his lawyers said in a statement, “was, ‘I am free. I am free.’ ”

U.S. District Judge Brian A. Jackson did a remarkably good and decent thing today -- something that every judge should aspire to do in the right circumstances. He found a way to bring a small measure of justice to a man whose entire life had been rife with injustice. He found a way to order the immediate release of Herman Wallace, a terminally ill prisoner who spent 40 years in solitary confinement at the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana in a 6' by 9' cell for a murder there was no valid evidence he committed. Last week, I wrote about this case here at The Atlantic because I felt it comprised so many of the failings of the American justice system. A black man whose trial is marked by racial animus. A defendant whose attorney does unconscionable work. A lack of physical evidence or adequate investigation. Co-defendants and state witnesses with obvious incentives to lie. Punishment that was both cruel and unusual. Deliberate indifference on the part of reviewing courts. It all happened to Herman Wallace. All of it and more; his case was a disgrace from the beginning.Here is the link to Judge Jackson's order. If you read it, you will discover that he did not focus upon any of these constitutional infirmities in granting Wallace the relief he sought. Instead, Judge Jackson held that the original indictment against Wallace, over 40 years ago, was constitutionally flawed because women were excluded from his grand jury. So you can add "equal protection violation" to the heap of ways in which Wallace's rights were denied by our courts for four decades. Here is what the judge wrote:

The record in this case makes clear that Mr. Wallace's grand jury was improperly chosen in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of "the equal protection of the laws," and that the Louisiana courts, when presented with the opportunity to correct this error, failed to do so.... Our Constitution requires this result even where, as here, it means overturning Mr. Wallace's conviction nearly forty years after it was entered.

In the hours after the ruling was made public, state lawyers rushed to object to the judge's ruling, arguing that Wallace, who is dying of liver cancer and may have only days to live, did not deserve to be allowed to be freed on bail while Louisiana decides whether to retry him or not. The conduct of these officials on this day is nothing if not consistent with Louisiana's treatment of this man throughout his entire adult life -- cruel and unusual to the bitter end.

At long last, Herman Wallace should be allowed to die in peace, and in freedom, as far away from that dreaded prison as his breath will take him. Let his miserable life and his early death become a symbol for all that is wrong about what America accepts today in its justice systems. Let it be a lesson, too, about perseverance and the ceaseless value of redemption. For decades, while he sat alone in that tiny, fetid cell, justice delayed to Wallace was justice denied to him. But today, while he is still alive to savor it, the law has turned away from injustice.

It is the first day of the rest of Herman Wallace's life -- and I sure hope it is not too late for him to enjoy it.

UPDATE: Immediately after Judge Jackson's initial order, attorneys with the East Baton Rouge district attorney's office filed a request to halt Wallace's release. This evening, Judge Jackson promptly rejected the request, again ordered the prisoner's immediate release, and warned prosecutors that they would be held in contempt if they refused to allow him to leave prison. Here is the link to that second order. Prosecutors have the right to appeal this ruling to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Maybe Jeffrey MacDonald was innocent after all

Remember the perceptual illusion where you look at a picture and you’re certain that you see the bust of a young woman? Then, if someone draws your attention to certain details, suddenly the picture transforms into the profile of an old woman. It’s a disorienting trick. You think you know what you’re seeing, but then you aren’t so sure.

The Jeffrey MacDonald murder case is one of the most disturbing in living memory. There are only two possible pictures, both nightmares.

Picture No. 1. Jeffrey MacDonald, a Princeton-educated Green Beret doctor with no history of violence and a sterling record, butchered his pregnant wife and two young daughters using a knife, ice pick and club. Then he injured himself and set up the scene to make the crimes appear to be the work of intruders. He claimed they chanted, “Kill the pigs! … Acid is groovy!” and scrawled the word “PIG” on the wall in his wife’s blood.

Picture No. 2. Jeffrey MacDonald, a bright young man with everything in life to look forward to, lost his wife and children to senseless, horrific violence. A military hearing found charges against him “untrue,” but he was convicted nine years later in a civilian trial. He has been imprisoned for three decades for a crime he did not commit.

Two possibilities: MacDonald is a monster, or he is a victim of terrible injustice. Young woman; old woman.

Until recently, most people saw Picture No. 1. So did I. I grew up in Raleigh, N.C., about an hour from the Fort Bragg army base in Fayetteville where the murders occurred on Feb. 17, 1970, in the middle of the night. I was born in May of that year, and would thus be the same age as the child Colette MacDonald was carrying when her life was snuffed out. In the early ’80s, I whipped through a dog-eared copy of “Fatal Vision,” Joe McGinniss’ sensational true-crime novel about the killings. It was almost as scary as ”Helter Skelter” – the story of the Charles Manson murders in California that are said to have inspired Jeffrey MacDonald in the coverup for his homicidal rampage.

In 1984 I was glued to the TV, like millions of other Americans, watching the popular miniseries based on McGinniss’ book. McGinniss made the murders sound like the work of a diabolical genius, a man who could transform in a moment from a loving father to a homicidal maniac, and again, in the blink of an eye, to a calculating con man. I thought of devils that lurked in human flesh, like in “The Exorcist,” another popular based-on-a true-story-book-turned-movie of the period that floated around our house. When the show was over, I retired to the safety of my bed, safe from unpredictable evils.

A Shifting Picture

McGinniss’ stark rendering of Picture No. 1 stuck in my mind until recently when a friend from North Carolina told me that Errol Morris had published a book suggesting MacDonald was innocent. That got my attention: the Oscar-winning Morris, whose film “The Thin Blue Line” exonerated a Texas man wrongfully convicted for murder, is one of the world’s great documentary filmmakers. He is both a careful researcher and a profound investigator of the human condition.

My friend and I sat around in her backyard, tossing up what facts about the case we could recall. I even laughed at the idea of hippie murderers in North Carolina. Of all places! But then I felt uneasy. “You sure Errol Morris wrote the book?” She was sure.

Soon I was reading Morris’ “A Wilderness of Error,” feeling skeptical and wondering why this reputable man would involve himself in a case that everyone and their mother (including mine) knew the truth about.

But it didn’t take long to realize that something was wrong. Enough somethings to fill the long, solitary chapters of a man’s life unfolding behind prison walls.

Morris researched the MacDonald case for 20 years and knows each labyrinthine turn of its progress through the criminal justice system. Even before bureaucratic stalling and federal machinery overtook the search for truth, things were working against Jeffrey MacDonald. A crime scene was left open to bystander traffic. Inexperienced military police failed to pick up a woman near the house who fit MacDonald’s description. Many think this woman could have been Helena Stoeckley, a drug abuser and professed member of a witchcraft cult who repeatedly confessed to having been at the MacDonald house the night of the murders, but recanted her story whenever she seemed to fear prosecution. Now deceased, she remains a pivotal figure in the case.

As I read Morris’ meticulous examination the evidence, the picture in my mind became less clear. I began to see that Joe McGinniss’ creation of Picture No. 1 might be just that: a creation. Some of the “facts” I thought I knew began to look more like ideas conjured by eager prosecutors and a journalist who had dealt so disingenuously with Jeffrey MacDonald in writing ”Fatal Vision” that he was sued after publication. McGinniss’ publisher settled with MacDonald out of court, after the judge called the author a “con man.” (This story, in its own right, became a famous book about journalistic ethics by Janet Malcolm.)

The story many of us think we know tells that MacDonald’s wounds were superficial. But he had multiple bruises and puncture wounds, and two stab wounds, including one that collapsed his lung — a serious injury that left him falling in and out of consciousness. The popular story says there was no evidence of intruders. But there was, including wax drippings (MacDonald insisted that one of the intruders carried a candle), fibers and hairs that did not belong to the household or family members.

McGinniss drew on pop-sociology to render an image of a psychopathic killer in the guise of the friendly doctor-next-door; the kind we know from endless horror movies. He theorized that diet pills caused MacDonald to fly into a fit of rage. McGinniss had to be creative, because the man’s character never fit the crime. MacDonald had no history of violence or temper. When the initial military hearing was conducted in 1970, no one in his life could be found who had a bad thing to say about him. Psychiatric professionals on both sides pronounced him incapable of having committed the crimes. On the evening of the murders, Jeffrey MacDonald had taken his kids to ride the pony he had bought them, fed them dinner while their mother took a night class, and put them to bed. It didn’t make sense.

But did hippie intruders make sense? Maybe more than I would have thought as a teen. Vietnam-era Fayetteville was not sleepy Raleigh in the 1980s. There was violence. Soldiers’ corpses arrived at Fort Bragg stuffed with heroin. In 1970 America was gripped by the horror of the Manson murders – a fact used against MacDonald because he subscribed to Esquire magazine, which had run a story about the dark side of hippie culture. The Esquire story, for all its salaciousness, touched upon real issues that plagued many communities outside of California. In Fayetteville, an Army town, strong tensions existed between Army types like Jeffrey MacDonald on one side of the war, and hippies and protesters on the other. Helena Stoeckley confessed many times that MacDonald’s willingness to turn heroin addicts in to the police infuriated local drug dealers. She knew this world, and was herself a police informant. According to her, they wanted to teach MacDonald a lesson and rough up his family the night of the killings. But things got out of hand.

In October 1970, following an investigation and hearing, the military dropped its case against MacDonald, and he was honorably discharged from the Army. He moved to California to become the director of emergency medicine at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Long Beach. But an unfortunate thing happened in the following years. MacDonald’s relationship with his father-in-law, originally a staunch supporter, became strained. Freddy Kassab had inserted himself into the 1970 military hearing and made himself the center of a media circus, holding news conferences and firing off letter to members of Congress. He wanted his son-in-law to stay on the East Coast and pursue the killers. Eventually, he turned on the man he had once so ardently defended. Through his aggressive pursuit of the case, MacDonald was indicted.

MacDonald was tried in a civilian court in 1979. Many felt that his acquittal would be a cinch, but much more was to go wrong. The nine-year lag between the murders and the trial is extremely unusual; experts consider such a lag to pose a great danger of wrongful conviction. Appearances didn’t help MacDonald, either. He looked angry on the stand. Worse still, Judge Franklin Dupree seemed to have his mind made up before the trial began. Some said he should never have taken the case because his former son-in-law was the prosecutor in the original Army hearing. Dupree would not admit overwhelming psychiatric testimony in MacDonald’s favor, nor the testimony of witnesses to whom Helena Stoeckley had confessed her involvement. Bernie Segal, a long-haired Jewish lawyer from Philadelphia, took the lead in the case and managed to alienate the entire courtroom. Segal took up nearly all the time in the critical period for closing remarks and left only a few minutes for co-counsel Wade Smith, an eloquent native Carolinian who understood the jury.

One thing about this case is never in doubt no matter who’s talking: If Wade Smith had been able to lead and give his closing remarks, MacDonald would be a free man today.

The list of misfortunes goes on: exculpatory evidence withheld; possible prosecutorial misconduct; and fallible humans who twisted the MacDonald story to fit their own agendas. MacDonald was convicted twice, both in the courtroom and in the all-important court of public opinion, which was sealed by McGinniss’ book and miniseries.

Since 1979, the MacDonald case has continued to trouble those who delve beneath the surface of the media narrative. The social justice movement is now involved; the Innocence Project, a prestigious nationwide network dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted, has worked strenuously for MacDonald’s conviction to be overturned. In a 2011 press release, the Innocence Project stated:

Since MacDonald was convicted of the murders in 1979, considerable evidence of his innocence has come to light. Most recently, retired US Marshall Jimmy Britt came forward with information that another suspect in the case, Helena Stoeckley, admitted to the prosecutor that she was in the house on the night of MacDonald’s murder and that he treated to indict her for first degree murder if she admitted that in court. In addition, DNA testing on evidence that was recovered from the fingernails scrapings of one of the victims and a hair found under another victim did not match MacDonald. Earlier, evidence came to light that a FBI forensic examiner mislead the jury about synthetic hair evidence. MacDonald claimed the hairs were from the wig of one of the murders, but the forensic examiner incorrectly claimed they were from one of the children’s dolls.

None of this has set MacDonald free. By now, many members of the original hearing and 1979 trial are dead, including Judge Dupree. Judge James Fox, a close friend of Dupree’s and quite elderly himself, has taken over and has dismissed appeals. Recently, the 4th District Court of Appeals ordered Fox to consider new evidence, and to examine all the evidence as a whole. On Sept. 17, 2012, in Wilmington, N.C., a crowd of familiar faces assembled for a new hearing. Jeffrey MacDonald, Joe McGinniss, prosecutor James Blackburn (who went to prison himself for defrauding his clients), Wade Smith and others newer to the case gathered once again to testify.

MacDonald now waits to see if the federal judge will vacate his 33-year-old conviction. He could get an answer by the end of this year.

Wade Smith rarely grants interviews. I contacted his office, and to my surprise, he was willing to talk to me. What follows is the transcript of our conversation.

Interview: The Spookiest Case Wade Smith Ever Encountered

Lynn Parramore: In all your years as a lawyer, what makes this case stand out?

Wade Smith: It’s a very spooky case. It’s a case that if you were telling scary stories around the dining room table and you had all your family gathered, people could hardly believe it. It’s a scary, spooky story that sounds made up. It has witchcraft in it. It has Helena Stoeckley, the dominant person who continues to play a remarkable role. She’s haunting this case. In the hearing we just had in Wilmington she played an important role, decades after her death. It is also a Manson-like killing. It has Charles Manson written all over it. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the late 1960s and early ’70s there were spooky, weird people on acid — back then it was believable.

LP: Then why did MacDonald, the emblem of law-and-order, the Green Beret, become a suspect? Why did people in the community believe he did it?

WS: In every murder of a spouse, the remaining spouse is the No. 1 suspect and is almost always charged. Often, the spouse turns out to have committed the murder, so it’s not surprising that the case turned to McDonald. The crime scene was so messed up that you couldn’t depend on it. So MacDonald was the logical choice. And yet there are thousands of people in North Carolina who do not believe he did it.

Even back then, if you polled Fayetteville folks, you might have found that a lot of people did not believe that he did it. The military hearing found that the charges against MacDonald were not true. He was given an honorable discharge. He could have gone on with his life, and he should have. But he taunted the police. He made fun of them. He did interviews. When Victor Worheide, who was a federal prosecutor, later became interested in the case at the urging of the parents of Colette MacDonald, the case was gone.

LP: In Joe McGinniss’ book, ”Fatal Vision,” Freddy Kassab, MacDonald’s father-in-law, was presented as the protagonist. What do you recall of the in-laws in the trial?

WS: They were a very normal-looking mama and daddy. Nothing unique in any way. I think that one of the problems MacDonald had was that they expected him to undertake to find these killers, to go on a mission to find them. He didn’t do that. He continued to work as a doctor and moved to California. Some people would say that was the wrong thing to do. Others would say that that was a healthy thing to do. But his mother- and father-in-law did not want him to do that.

LP: Did anything new come out in the Wilmington hearing in September?

Oh, yes. Back in the 1979 trial, a lawyer named Jerry Leonard represented Helena Stoeckley. No one ever knew what it was Helena told him because of attorney-client privilege. He was the lawyer she was talking to one-on-one who had been appointed to advise her of her rights. I used to joke with him when I saw him around – “Hey Jerry, isn’t there something you want to tell us?” But he couldn’t, and he likely would have gone to his grave carrying the secret of what Helena told him had it not been for that hearing. Finally, in Wilmington, Jerry Leonard was ordered to tell what she had said to him 30 years ago. And she told him she had been there, at the MacDonald home, the night of the murders.

LP: She said that to her lawyer at the time of the 1979 trial? Thinking that he could never reveal it?

WS: Yes.

LP: One of the things that struck me in reading Errol Morris’ book was the use of the “psychopath” diagnosis in court and how problematic that is. Wherever you see the label “psychopath,” you could almost substitute “monster” or “vampire” – you’re talking about an unnatural person who does not behave according to normal human rules, and with that label, you can believe anything of them. What’s your sense of this?

WS: It’s an enormous problem. Take a guy like MacDonald. He’s the guy that lives next door. The loving husband and father. You trust him. If he could have a psychotic episode and destroy his family – stab them with an ice pick and a knife 100 times, beat them with a stick, then Billy Graham could. Anybody could. That was my closing argument.

LP: The one you never got to make?

WS: Yes. I would have told the jury that it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense that this man, with no history of violence, went crazy like that. It all was intruders. I would have said to the jury: they were not there, and neither was I. They don’t know the truth any more than I do. The idea that people that were so certain who don’t know any more than I do — I don’t believe I’ll ever understand how they could be so sure.

LP: What has this case revealed about the flaws in our judicial system?

WS: We all depend on excellent, honest detective work. And police officers knowing how to take care of a crime scene and preserve it. The walls will tell you what happened if you keep it pristine. Sometimes that doesn’t happen. That didn’t happen here. And so there are going to be cases where there is a reasonable doubt as to what actually happened. That is the way our legal system is set up. The defendant has no obligation to prove anything whatsoever. That huge standard protects us from miscarriages of justice.

LP: Judge Fox is a close friend of Judge Dupree, who presided over the 1979 trial. Is it possible that Jeffrey MacDonald will get justice under these circumstances?

I thought the world of Judge Dupree. He was a true gentleman, even though there were things in the trial and there were decisions he made that I disagree with. Judge Fox is also a good man. I’ve had many cases in court. I don’t know what the odds are. But I’m an optimist generally about our system of justice, and I hope that MacDonald get a break.

LP: Is Jeffrey MacDonald innocent?

WS: For me to say that he is innocent would require magic. I don’t have that magic. I wasn’t there that night. But there is a reasonable doubt, and because there is a reasonable doubt it is absolutely clear that he should be set free.

Why the MacDonald Case Matters to Everyone

I have read transcripts, articles, books, opinions, blogs and bizarre rantings about psychopaths on Joe McGinniss’ website to help me more clearly see the picture of the MacDonald case. Like Wade Smith, I’ve been struck by how many people speak of absolute certainty about what happened that February night over 40 years ago. As if they had seen it with their own eyes. Such is the power of a good story.

Or maybe there’s something else at work: Picture No. 2 is even more awful to see than Picture No. 1. When a terrible crime is committed, society comes together to find someone to blame and to pay for the collective sense of violation. When you accept Picture No. 1, you’re deciding that Jeffrey MacDonald is the Person Who Must Pay. To dislodge an idea reinforced by a popular book and TV phenomenon would be hard enough, but to add the sickening sense that the wrong man has been paying is nearly unthinkable. It implicates us all.

Harvey Silverglate, a renowned civil liberties advocate, has been an appellate attorney for MacDonald. He is outspoken about MacDonald’s innocence, and when I called him, I could hear the years of outrage in his voice over the way the case has proceeded. Silverglate believes that Jeffrey MacDonald has been railroaded, and that this railroading exposes disturbing trends in our federal criminal justice system. He worries that we are moving into a period in which the finality of verdicts is so zealously protected (a legacy, in part, of 9/11) that new evidence offers little hope of challenging them. MacDonald has had mostly good lawyers, though not always the appropriate ones. But Silverglate points out that those lawyers have been up against an increasingly perverse system in which ancient legal rights like habeas corpus have been tossed aside in the name of preserving convictions at any cost. (See Silverglate’s article on the case in Forbes.)

Out of all the evidentiary and procedural twists and turns, I asked Silverglate to name the one that bothered him the most about the MacDonald case.

“The one thing that sticks in my craw above anything else is this: There were lab results. There was a re-examination of the fibers found on the bodies of Collette and the children. These fibers on the bodies didn’t match any fibers found in the MacDonald house. There were fibers from a blonde wig that matched the description of Helena Stoeckley. The FBI lab guy turned over two copies to Brian Murtaugh, the prosecutor. There’s a note attached. This note says: ‘Brian, I’m giving you this lab report. I’m giving you an extra copy for Bernie Segal [the defense counsel]. You can give it to him.’ Brian Murtaugh says, ‘Sure, I’ll give it to him. I’ll be seeing him.’ Well, Bernie Segal told me that he never saw it.”

In other words, an FBI lab technician trusted exculpatory evidence to a member of the prosecution team. Evidence the defense never saw.

Silverglate predicts that even after examining the new evidence, Judge Fox will not grant Jeffrey MacDonald a new trial. But he is hopeful that the Fourth Court of Appeals, located in Richmond, Va., will take a careful look at the case and as a whole be more favorable to MacDonald. There may be hope that MacDonald will eventually gain his freedom and at least be able to live the last few years of his life outside of a prison cell.

After traveling a months-long journey that has led me from certainty to doubt to horror at a grave injustice, I’m going to turn in this article and then go run some errands and make myself a bite to eat. Mundane things that Jeffrey MacDonald has not been able to do for over 30 years. The simple acts of coming and going as I please and caring for my own basic needs have been denied him. His wife, Colette, and his children have also been forever denied these things — but not, I have come to believe, by the man who is currently serving three consecutive life sentences.

Tonight when I retire to my bed, I will not feel as safe from unpredictable evils as I did when I was a teenager reading scary stories. Even scarier stories, I’ve found, can be true. Stories about the innocent caught in a machine that perverts every possibility of justice. That kind of story never ends. There is no finality in injustice.

THE WRONGFUL BLOG: Changes at Center on Wrongful Convictions Reveal the Power of a Few

As reported in the Chicago Tribune today (here) and in a release from Northwestern University Law School, Rob Warden, co-founder and executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law will retire at the end of the academic year. He has served fifteen years leading the Center’s pioneering efforts. With the dedicated assistance of others, he and the Center on Wrongful Convictions have freed the innocent and have been influential in prompting a staggering list of policy reforms.
Warden co-founded the Center in 1998 with Lawrence Marshall, a former Northwestern law professor now at Stanford University. Warden will become the Center’s executive director emeritus.
A journalist, Warden worked for the Chicago Daily News and other papers before joining Northwestern. As is pointed out on the Center’s website (here) when the Center was founded, wrongful convictions were considered “anomalies—rare exceptions to an otherwise well-oiled criminal justice machine.”
The Center on Wrongful Convictions has expanded awareness of the reality that justice systems make mistakes, that countless innocent persons have been wrongfully convicted, that recurring common contributors prompt miscarriages, and that reforms can reduce wrongful convictions.
Working in the three areas of representation, research, and reform, the Center on Wrongful Convictions has had a profound impact on the lives of dozens of innocent men and women whose exonerations the Center has enabled or assisted. Center faculty, staff attorneys, and CWC law students have garnered the assistance of pro bono lawyers to assist in representing imprisoned clients with worthy claims of innocence. The Center initiated the first projects in the nation focusing on wrongfully convicted youth and wrongfully convicted women.
Under Warden’s leadership, the Center has been a leader in doing critical research on the causes of wrongful conviction and translating this research into reform recommendations. The Center has been at the forefront of reforms in Illinois that include then-Governor Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000; the passage of comprehensive criminal justice reform legislation in the state in 2003; expanded DNA testing in criminal cases; provision of adequate funding for indigent defendants; Governor Quinn’s abolition of the death penalty in 2011; compensation for the wrongfully convicted, and more.
Warden co-founded with Law Professor Samuel Gross of the University of Michigan Law, the National Registry of Exonerations, an online searchable database (here), which provides detailed information on all known exonerations since 1989. Today the Registry is reporting 1,210, a number that grows with each new or newly discovered exoneration.
With Warden’s retirement, the Center on Wrongful Convictions also announced other changes of individuals who have dedicated themselves to the Center’s work. Steven Drizin, a 1986 graduate of Northwestern Law, who has served as legal director for the past eight years, completed his work in this capacity on September 1, 2013, to assume the role of Assistant Dean at the Bluhm Legal Clinic, which houses more than 20 clinics within 14 centers including the Center on Wrongful Convictions.
Karen Daniel and Jane Raley, the two most senior staff attorneys at the Center on Wrongful Convictions, are the newly named co-legal directors of the Center. Both have been with the Center since 2000. Daniel is a 1981 graduate of Harvard Law School, and Raley is a 1982 graduate of Indiana University School of Law.
Steven Drizin, calling Daniel and Raley “obvious choices” to take over as legal directors of the Center, said of the two: “They are two of the finest post-conviction and appellate attorneys in the country, often finding creative ways to win for their innocent clients where others before them have failed.”
The press release from Northwestern Law concluded, “Karen and Jane are also two of our most highly regarded teachers at the Clinic. They will inspire colleagues and students to provide the best possible service to our clients and to our system of justice. The CWC is one of the crown jewels of the Law School and has thrived under Steve and Rob’s leadership. We have every confidence that the CWC will rise to new and even more astounding heights with Karen and Jane at the helm.”
It is difficult to quantify the impact of these few who have done the hard work of seeking justice post conviction. Or to imagine where innocence efforts in the justice system would be without Rob Warden. Working shoulder-to-shoulder with Steve Drizin, Karen Daniel, Jane Raley, and other staff and pro bono lawyers, Rob Warden provided leadership that enabled the Center on Wrongful Convictions to give hope to the wrongfully convicted, free the innocent, expand awareness of systemic issues in the criminal justice system, and advance long overdue policy reforms.
Thank you, Rob Warden. Thank you, Steven Drizin, Karen Daniel, and Jane Raley, and Godspeed to all of you in your next chapter

Governor pardons, frees innocent man

JARRATT, Va - This will be a happy Thanksgiving for Jonathan Montgomery, the first in many years.

Gov. Bob McDonnell on Tuesday issued a conditional pardon and ordered the release of the innocent Florida man who was in prison for sexual assaults his accuser now says did not happen.

Montgomery, who was locked up on Dec. 10, 2008, after being convicted of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl — an attack that did not occur — emerged from the Greensville Correctional Center at 8:15 p.m. Tuesday.

“It feels great,” he said. “This is awesome. This is the best experience I’ve had in four years.”

His first few moments of freedom were spent under a half moon in front of television cameras outside the prison.

Standing near him, his mother, Mishia Woodruff, of Panama City, Fla., said she felt “liberated. Liberated from all the lies.”

Montgomery, 26, was serving a seven-year, six-month sentence for crimes allegedly committed in Hampton in 2000 against Elizabeth Paige Coast, who recently admitted she lied and is now facing a perjury charge.

Asked how they felt about Coast, Montgomery said he could not comment. “It’s just too awful.”

His mother said, “She can’t take back what she did.”

Montgomery’s lawyer, Ben Pavek, Hampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Anton Bell and the judge who convicted him attempted to get Montgomery out of prison by court order on Nov. 9.

But a Virginia rule takes jurisdiction away from a circuit judge 21 days after a case is final. That meant Montgomery could be released only with a pardon from McDonnell or a writ of actual innocence from the Virginia Court of Appeals.

“It is a travesty of justice when an innocent person is confined in a jail or prison, and it should never occur in our society,” McDonnell said in a statement announcing the conditional pardon.

He added: “This situation has been a tragedy. An innocent man was in jail for four years. While tonight Mr. Montgomery is free from prison, he will never get those years of his life back. Tonight I called Jonathan to personally offer, on behalf of the citizens of the commonwealth, our heartfelt apologies for all that he has been put through due to this miscarriage of justice.”

The governor received the official conditional pardon request from Montgomery’s lawyers at 10 p.m. Monday.

Pavek, Montgomery’s lawyer, said: “I am elated my client is at liberty. ... And I am extremely grateful for the expeditious way Governor McDonnell acted. He said he would move expeditiously, and he did.”

Shawn Armbrust, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, said, “We’re thrilled that the governor acted so quickly and that he did the right thing.”

The offices of McDonnell and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said this week that they are willing to assist Montgomery as promptly as possible and in any appropriate way. The Innocence Project and Pavek are working on a petition for a writ of actual innocence, which must be filed with the Virginia Court of Appeals.

Reached by telephone, David Montgomery, the innocent man’s father, said the family will celebrate Thanksgiving at his home near Hickory, N.C.

“We were preparing for the worst hoping for the best,” said the elated father, noting that he got the good news in a voice mail from McDonnell.

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